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Date:      Tue, 29 Apr 1997 10:03:57 +0200 (SAT)
From:      John Hay <jhay@zibbi.mikom.csir.co.za>
To:        dg@root.com
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Memory usage on NFS server
Message-ID:  <199704290803.KAA18509@zibbi.mikom.csir.co.za>
In-Reply-To: <199704290720.AAA11888@implode.root.com> from David Greenman at "Apr 29, 97 00:20:09 am"

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> >    2.2-970420-RELENG on an NFS server that does only that.  The ~20
> >processes normally running on the machine add up to less than 10MB,
> >yes `top' reports that 78MB is "active".  I would have though most of
> >the memory would be allocated as cache (which is only reported at
> >25MB).  Am I interpreting the numbers incorrectly?
> ...
> >Mem: 78M Active, 4984K Inact, 17M Wired, 25M Cache, 8343K Buf, 616K Free
> 
>    The numbers lie; don't believe them. :-) It's not as simple as looking
> at the "cache" number - pages in "active" and "inactive" are also part of
> the file cache. I know this makes it very difficult to see how much memory
> is actually available for caching...I have the same problem on wcarchive.
> We need to provide an additional metric, but I don't know at the moment
> how to create the desired information (it's difficult and perhaps impossible
> in the current architecture).
> 

Do the numbers that top and ps show for per process memory usage also lie?
What I see here on my news server, is that I run out of swap (256M), but
according to top and ps a rough calculation of the total of all the
processes is less than half that. Inn then typically show a usage of
~70M according to top, but as soon as I kill and restart it the swap usage
go down to ~5M. I once even added a 128M vn swapfile and it filled that
also without inn showing a usage of more than 70M, but killing and
restarting it takes the swap usage down to ~5M.

John
-- 
John Hay -- John.Hay@mikom.csir.co.za



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